For the Brexit movers and shakers, the past isn't what it used to be, and nor is the present. There was a time – before Gina Miller, liberal ‘remoaners’ and Commons Speaker John Bercow sabotaged everything – when Brexit Britain knew it was heading straight for the exit. But this week Theresa May has gone into full Slobodan Milošević mode, pitting the people against parliament with her populist “I’m on your side” plea. And the EU has handed responsibility back to the UK government for the chaos they’ve created. So all bets are on, and we need to ask ourselves some hard questions. As thousands prepare for the People’s Vote march – is no-deal a real possibility, is it a dream, and how did we get into this mess?
In one sense, the Brexit headbangers only have themselves to blame. Crashing to earth from a blue-sky daydream of their own making, they’ve chosen fantasy over fact every time. Three things explain their retreat into absurdity. First, Brexit was a PR campaign and an attitude, never a policy. A campaign that transformed a public who cared little for Europe into partisans, and got them to support a fuzzy cultural meme that was, as Anthony Barnett writes, “inspired by a past when, supposedly, we knew who we were and governed our own lives”. A xenophobic attitude, supported by hateful tabloid headlines, that nudged Leave over the line but left Britain’s place in the world and its colonial past unresolved. A two-and-a-half-year car crash that has left millions, especially in Remain-supporting Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, asking: What is Britain for?
Second, the idea of Brexit as something that can be “delivered” also has its roots in colonialism. Foreign cultures were once delivered back to Britain in the form of the museum, the exhibition and the botanical garden; forms of pedagogy by which citizens saw the Empire as a civilising instrument and economic necessity. As historian Paul Greenhalgh writes, “Empire was a commodity, a thing more important than but not dissimilar to shawls, ironwork, flax or indeed sculpture ... Countries within the empire were exhibited, as quantifiable batches of produce rather than as cultures.” And just as countries in the Empire were exploited, so countries in the EU became mere pathways for our own free trade. In 1988, in a speech opening the Single Market Campaign, Margaret Thatcher complained that “Europe wasn't open for business. Underneath the rhetoric, the old barriers remained," suggesting that Europe, in order to succeed and prosper, needed British entrepreneurial clout.
